The Japanese taikusai is an array of wacky games and ridiculous performances and made me wonder
why anyone found such events entertaining. If I didn't know any better, I might think that there were bets
between the teachers, each trying to find a humorous way to make the students - "little gladiators" as I
heard them called - stay at school an extra hour or two each day. I imagined them saying,
"Hey, let's make 'em jump through fire rings this afternoon!"
But then I witnessed the event twice and realized it was not a joke at all.
Here in rural Japan, where life moved at barnacle
speed there was also a paradoxical seriousness. This was a sports day, one that should have been respite for 12 year olds
who hate history and math, a chance to play outside during school hours. Instead, the kids told me they hated it, they were tired,
and they wished they could go back to the classroom where at least they could rest.
For two weeks leading up to a Sunday in mid-September, practice for the taikusai consumed the
great majority of each day. Academic lessons, especially English lessons I
might have instructed, were canceled in favor of potato sack races.
I was told that Mima practiced "especially harder" (English lessons, anyone?)
for this event, though every school in Japan had something just like it.
It appeared to be a great source of pride for the townspeople, who turned out in the hundreds to
watch their sons and daughters compete and perform in sundry ways.
The performances were absurd to me and I wondered what purpose they served
- dolphin "dances" in front of rows of interlocked
students impersonating the ocean's waves, human pyramids constructed and destroyed on a whistle's
cue, and the school song repeated copious times daily at blistering decibels.
On one occasion, I listened to the music teacher,
Urasaki-sensei, berate the children for not singing loud enough.
"I can't hear you!!" she screamed. "Not yet!! LOUDER!" By the time the students had complied the song had ceased to be music,
it was mere noise. It was sad poetic justice when the same teacher
fell ill later in the week from overwork. She entered the teacher's lounge one morning haunched over looking like
she had been
in a twelve round prizefight, but she stayed at work all day nevertheless. It seemed odd to me that in a small town,
where one usually associates a slow pace with
a laid back lifestyle, people were running themselves sick from overwork.
But that seemed endemic to all of Japan, a country fiercely committed to long work hours and endurance in the face
of hardship.
These values were not demographically determined either; the rural areas and urban centers both suffered the same.
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Like the song ceasing to be music, many things in Japan, from the construction industry juggernaut to its misuse of
the English language, are taken to the extreme and
in the process lose their original meaning. This is the same mentality that helped Japan conquer most of Asia in WWII as well as become an economic
powerhouse after the war. Extreme measures have extreme consequences, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
Rivers and seasides in Japan
are covered in concrete for no good reason (see Alex Kerr's, "Dogs and Demons"), English is used ad absurdum on billboards
and tee-shirts
in ways that would make a grammar teacher cringe (see www.engrish.com). Baseball is "worked" in Japan, not played,
says Robert Whiting in his book, "You Gotta Have Wa".
The expression, "Western technology, Japanese values," is often attributed to this phenomena.
But this is a bit misleading. A better slogan might be, "Western things, Japanese extremism."
One example of this is the public address. Almost everywhere in Japan one is inundated with what Kerr calls
"noise pollution":
political slogans, town songs, corporate advertisements, and important though oftem ignored as a result of a crying wolf
syndrome, public warnings. The best you can hope for in this sea of squawking are thick walls or airplane earplugs.
Oddly, these sort of weapons of mass disquietude seemed out of place. In a country that frequently names their daughters
"Quiet" ("Shizuka") one might think this cacophony would be frowned upon. Here is yet another piece of Western modernity in
tension with traditional Japanese values.
Back at the taikusai, the loudspeakers were still at full volume, but now with folk dance music instead
of teacher's prohibitions.
The students skipped to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda" and other Western songs,
though I could not tell how that was worthy of inclusion in a sports day.
But the competitions, between three equally sized and primarily colored borakku's (katakana, Japan's load word script,
speak for 'blocks'), may have offered the mostinsight into why an event like the taikusai is a
mainstay of the Japanese school year.
The Japanese seem to strive to a "meritocracy through competition" ideal, (The steadfast committment to equal
primary education is proof of this: teachers
are rotated yearly to ensure that each student from age 5 to 15, no matter where she lives,
has an equal opportunity to succeed on the high school entrance exams.) so events like the taikusai seem to be
where the winners and losers of Japanese society are first crowned or drowned.
There are champions: the third year class president and winner of the individual 400 meter race by
several strides, who then gloated as if it had been Sydney 2000. The elderly crowd looked on and grimaced as
he raised clenched fists with pride.
There are failures: those who are slow or short or lack the confidence to compete
with better endowed peers. They are never cheered - the underdog seems to have no endearing
fan base here.
And there are the rest, who do as they are told and
don't impress but don't disappoint either. The first two groups are fringers, and the latter make an event
like the taikusai possible in the first place. Without the middle-of-the-packers, there would be no
bamboo races, where four or five students carry another on a "chair" made from bamboo and rope.
Neither would there be unicycle races, but instead of riding the singular wheel, the students
in this case run behind them with their backs haunched over as if they were bowing to the wheel
itself. I wondered, what free-thinking individual would submit to such buffoonery? In the scorching heat of
late summer, a solid group of "yes"-students were the necessary foundation for this militaristic event.
And it is militaristic. A holdover from WWII, when young boys were needed for the war effort, chiefly the
kamikaze missions, the
taikusai endured in the way that many things endure here in Japan, by the sheer inertia of the traditional thwarting change.
My thoughts were these: if the taikusai is a pre-WWII relic and continues only out of respect for tradition,
then it needs to be junked. If on the other hand it had been confirmed as educational and worthwhile, then
by all means it should be continued. (I had a hard time believing that such reflection had been undertaken, however, and
admittedly, I was nearly always cynical of Japanese motives.) To me, the taikusai is yet another exercise in
modern Japanese fascism, and it scared me. (Though Japan
is for the most part still firmly dedicated to pacifism, the central government has recently taken steps to
undermine that dedication. Troops are being readied for
tours in Iraq, and the looming threat of a conflict with North Korea hardens most otherwise docile Japanese.) If anyone
thinks that Japan is well out of the shadow of its war-mongering past, one need only look at the taikusai to see how
militaristic the country still is, and
how easy a jump from "sports practice" to "military exercises" would be. (I would compare it to Americans tenacious
protection of its guns, we may
rationalize them as defensive, but triggered, they are by nature offensive weapons. Japan is, in a similar way, still on its
collective toes, ready for war.) Several of the male colleagues love the unity of the taikusai,
one calls himself a "samurai" and another openly admitted that
he would rather work for the National Self Defense Forces than teach at a school.
